Drilling Holes for Nutplates

After a much needed vacation and ordering parts from Aircraft Spruce we were able to do a little on the airplane again.  The Wingtips were removed and the holes previously drilled for screws were used to locate the two mounting holes for each nutplate.  The actual nutplates were used as drill guides.  The nutplates were cleco's to the rib through the center hole, and the mounting holes in the rib were drilled through the nutplate mounting holes for a precise location.  There are 25 nutplates to be installed in each wingtip area.  Time: 1 hour.

Left Wingtip Holes

We continued to work on the left wingtip mounting.  The holes on the bottom of the wing were laid out with a 2.75" spacing.  We are planning on using nutplates with AN526C screws, which is a 6-32 screws.  This requires a 9/64" drill bit.  We drilled a new hole in our edge drill guide we created earlier to have the needed spacing.  We made sure the wingtip was mounted correctly and level and clamped it in place.  We then drilled the holes and placed clecos in each location.  Hours: 3

Holes drilled and clecos installed

Nutplate to be used

Left Wingtip Work

Continued work on the left fiberglass wingtip. We laid out the mounting holes using a 3" spacing on the top of the wing. Hours: 1

Left Wingtip fitted

Spent a few hours fitting, trimming, sanding, and filing the left fiberglass wingtip.  It now looks like it fits very well, and has precisely 1/4 inch spacing between the aileron and the wingtip.  The trailing edge also lines up great with the wingtip.  We took our time and trimmed just a small bit at a time because it's easy to remove material, but very hard to add it back if you mess up.   We had an interruption in the middle of this work as power to the whole house was lost, but we were able to keep working after pulling out a generator and cranking it up. Hours: 3.5

Left wingtip temporarily clamped to wing

Various Left Wing Work

After a long day at work, we did some various tasks on the left wing and talked about future tasks.  One small section had to have some Hysol epoxy repair work.  We also started to discuss where to do some Hysol clean-up work on some of the Factory installed options.  We  also started to look at where filler is going to be needed.  Hours: 1

Fabric rivet holes, left wing tip

We finished drilling 1/8" holes for the fabric-attach rivets in the rib caps for the left wing.  These were spaced 3" apart along each rib on the top side of the wing (holes on the bottom side were spaced 2.75").  We also started fitting the fiberglass wing-tip to the left wing.  Hours: 2.0